LeoFinance announced the launch of the LoeBridge yesterday. It's an important first step towards making things easier for people to transact from Ethereum ERC20 tokens into BSC BEP20 tokens. And that's a key thing to take note of: it's a first step.

Right now the functionality is pretty basic. There is a limited list of tokens to choose from at the moment, both on the ERC20 side, as well as the BEP20 side.

Limitations

The UI is based off of the Uniswap interface, as many might recognize. I stripped down a lot of the uniswap interface code, since we aren't using all their features.

One thing is we are using the custom contracts that were developed by other devs in LeoFinance. This is what gets used when the tokens leave your wallet.

Another things is that they had their own lists that came with the app. There were a lot of tokens. But not all of those tokens are supported on the backend LeoBridge. Why? Because you need to have a token that has a pairing with ETH. At least that's the way it is for now. Eventually, there will be full token support.

I had to break down and modify how units were was handling tokens. This is because the other list is not even a ERC20 list of tokens, it's a BEP20 list of tokens. The units were up up was validating tokens. Since BEP20 tokens are not valid ERC20 tokens, the functionality as it was could not remain intact. It was a bit of a pain to figure out, but eventually I got things working where you can select from the custom lists of ERC20 and BEP20 tokens.

The backend LeoBridge also doesn't handle ETH directly. That's why when you look in the list of tokens in the From section, you won't see ETH. I have to change that, as the default token was ETH. Instead, you will find that you can only swap WETH to a BSC token. ETH will eventually be supported, but for now it isn't.

There is also a cap of $3,000 in any swap attempt.

Swapping

When you put in your from token amount, what you see in the to token amount for the other coin is a straight conversion of USD value. The to value is an estimate of what one token is worth in terms of another token. What you will get if you swap is not that amount shown, since there are fees along the way.

That's part of what needs to be developed for the LeoBridge. This is a working bridge, but lacks a lot of functionality people are used to having. Calculating the fees and including slippage limitations is something to be developed.

You have your gas fees to pay on transferring your ERC20 token to the LeoBridge backend contract address which will be swapped into wLEO. Then that has to be unwrapped into LEO. Then that is wrapped in bLEO. Then that is swapped into the token you want to receive and sent to your destination address you input into the LeoBridge UI. There also is a 0.25% swap fee in that which is used to burn CUB (80%) and bLEO (20%).

Future Development

As I mentioned, there are many limitations in the functionality people are accustomed to having on other platforms, be it a purely ERC20 swap like uniswap, a purely BEP20 swap like pancakes swap, or Binance's own bridge. This isn't an exchange which can convert or trade any token out there, but eventually we might get there. For now it's a very limited subset of ERC20 to BEP20.

Being able to use the LeoBridge obviously requires that you have ETH to pay the gas fees. Apart from that, you have to have the other token that you want to convert into a BEP20 token. But the list is limited as I mentioned. This has been a complaint for people who wanted to try the LeoBridge, as their token wasn't even there.

This will be one of the first things that gets added, the ability to add your own token that isn't already in the custom list we created. It's on it's way, with some snags that I need to deal with ;)

So forgive the limitations in the current version of the LoeBridge. It's a working version that does what it does, and not more. It doesn't do what people might expect, but that's where things are at right now. That probably means few people will use it, but with more development and improved functionality, may be more people will be interested in using it in the future.

When developing, either you wait for it to be completely done before making it public, or you can release it in the workings state that it is in. I work a full-time job, and have done development on the LeoBridge and Cub Finance site in my spare time. If you're interested in what the Leo bridge can potentially offer, just be patient and eventually it will be delivered.

Peace.